Dirt Nap Dispatches
by scumblackentropy
Summary: "Relax, Granger. I wanted a smoke. Then I wanted another. What better place to light up than in Hermione Granger's non-smoking stairwell? There's a bit of poetic justice to that, isn't there?"
1. Chapter 1

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."

Kurt Vonnegut

* * *

It started with Hermione Granger trying to prove a point.

When Draco Malfoy was announced as the Potions Specialist on their research team, it came as a shock to no one. After all, with Snape dead and Slughorn in hiding, it's not like there were any other Potions Masters of his caliber gallivanting around Wizarding Europe. It turned out that Malfoy's marks in Potions back in Hogwarts weren't entirely due to Snape's infamous nepotism; the slimy git _did_ have some talent.

The news, however unsurprising, was met with a uniform expression of malcontent and irritation across the board. Even Luna, whose normal state was one of placid imperturbability toward everyone and everything, scrunched her nose and said: "Ugh. Draco _Malfoy_? Can you _imagine_?"

Hermione _could_ imagine. She was, in fact, bestowed with the gift of an overreaching imagination. She could already picture it in her head: the attention-hungry strut, the sharp top lip poised to sneer at any moment, that set to his jaw that informed everyone that being allowed to breathe the same air as him was a highly-prized benediction. The very image brought a fresh wave of indignation down her spine, which was highly hypocritical of her, Hermione Granger—Stalwart Swot of Gryffindor and Former Knitter of House Elf Liberation Beanies—who often chastised her friends: "Come on, that was _ages_ago. Just drop it, okay?"

But Draco Malfoy had always been a special case.

In her head, he deserved nothing but her scorn.

Given that they were researching a _potion_—the Mortality Prognosticating Potion—it was inevitable that Malfoy would become a central contributor to their discovery and that all of them must at some point subject themselves to his fatally honed tongue and his acid superciliousness. Before he even arrived at the lab, everyone had already made up their minds against him. Hermione was no exception. Despite the fact that they were now co-workers, she found it odd to see him in such close proximity to her, and she kept waiting for that big black line to pop up between them and divide their respective territories.

In her head, Malfoy's smirking features went right along with things like lines, and categories, and labels. She on one side, he on the other. Glaring at each other across an uncrossable chasm.

What _was_ surprising, as they soon noticed, was that Malfoy no longer went out of his way to fling his wealth and privilege at anyone within earshot. This was possibly because his name was now synonymous with the words 'coward' and 'turncoat.' There were rumors of pitifully attenuated coffers, of a House gone to ruin (Those fucking albino peacocks? They're all dead, Dean Thomas claimed, smiling with malicious glee), of 'probation conditions,' of Malfoy Senior being in a very bad way, and of Narcissa Malfoy having died a penurious death. A disreputable death that all of them had to look forward to.

Hermione hadn't seen him since that day that ended the war, when she saw him huddled with his family, their faces petrified in identical looks of pale, pointy disbelief, as though they did not know whether to count themselves among the winners or the losers. She'd met Malfoy's eyes that night, a watery, red-rimmed grey all the way across the Great Hall, and she'd had to force herself to look away. She'd felt something yank at her gut—something that left her feeling cold and ashamed today. She did not know if it was anger, or disgust, or resentment, or spite. A vindication at seeing him so humiliated after he'd told her, for _years_, that her place was under his heel. A sanctimonious satisfaction at seeing the world work its justice. It was probably all of those.

She remembered writhing on a cold floor, the awful scent of clean, clean, reprehensibly clean marble branded forever in her brain, her joints locking, her bones melting into her bloodstream, as those same pale, pointy faces looked on.

More than the pain... They had seen her _beg_ for it to stop.

In her head, none of them deserved peace.

Anyway, Malfoy kept mostly to himself now. Oh, he was still nasty, still quite rude, still called her names like 'swotty cunt' or 'know-it-all bitch,' but the point is that he no longer went out of his way to be those things. No longer called her the big M word either. Shucked of his ingrained carapace of money and influence and cronies, he was just another boy who'd had to find his way out of the morass of the war. He was taciturn now, more inclined to walk away abruptly from a conversation than to goad his co-workers into a righteous snit.

He'd 'gone soft,' Ginny had once told her.

Even bullies had to grow up sometime. Hermione knew this all along.

But, somehow...

Something about the way Malfoy was powerless against his misfortunes turned her stomach. She thought she would enjoy it. Relish the sight, even. Merlin knew she had a tendency to ruthlessly cling to grudges.

But seeing it in the flesh in front of her made her feel... _bad_ for the guy. She refused to call it compassion. She refused to let herself be carried away by her bleeding-heart tendencies just because here was another underdog whose plight tugged at her sympathies. Malfoy was—and _is_—an arrogant, self-satisfied, craven little bugger, and a part of Hermione felt that this was the price he must duly pay for his sins.

But when her teammates discovered that Malfoy shied away from confrontation, that they could provoke him with impunity because the conditions of his probation prevented him from vindicating himself in any way, they started getting brazen around him. At first it was funny. They were just giving him a hard time, but it wasn't anything dangerous.

Then the snide commentary got more personal, the little pranks got a lot more serious. They taunted him about his dead mum, his dad's hair falling out, his Manor remaining unsold despite being on the market for a good two years. They put mild irritants in his food. It turned out that he was deathly allergic to Bundimun Extract and one of the potions they'd put in his tea—a boil-inducing concoction—put him in anaphylactic shock. Hermione still remembered the sight of his white-knuckled fingers clutching at his throat, his mouth opening and closing around a breath that did not make it to his heaving lungs, his entire face a swollen, angry red, twisting and grunting on the floor as her teammates laughed. He stopped eating at the office after that.

One time she'd seen him, late at night, trying to scrub something off his door with a cleaning brush. The very sight of him with a cleaning implement in his hand had struck her, not to the core, but pretty bloody close to it. He gave up after an hour. When he'd gone home, she went to his door to find the word 'Mal-fuck' smeared in tar all over the door. It smelled like battery acid, and it had been solidified with a Stick-On Charm. Malfoy's scrubbing only spread the letters out, the f blending into the u and the c into the k. It was still readable, though.

In her head, no one deserved this degree of mistreatment, not even nasty little buggers like Malfoy.

To his credit, he never missed a day of work. Of course, that could just be another condition of his probation.

It made her sick.

"Why do you let them?" she'd asked him one day, bursting into his office and on the verge of tears. _Screw_ the lines, she'd told herself.

His office was little more than an airless cage stuck right into the area with the most foot traffic. Passersby routinely banged on his door as they went through. In the dim, suffocating, dishwater-tinged light, his hair emitted a faint glow. She'd wondered once, a long time ago, if it was as soft as it looked.

He'd taken one glance at her and sneered. The movement stretched taut the skin on his gaunt face, the elegant secrets of his skull made known.

"Don't pretend you aren't one of _them_, Granger."

_Jesus_.

_That_ one certainly stuck with her.

She'd had to sit still for a few moments to think about things. And she was forced to the conclusion that if the war had taught her anything at all, it was that prejudice went both ways. Just because they were the _good guys_ didn't necessarily mean they were always good people. It wasn't anything profound, but it caught her by surprise nonetheless. She'd never liked seeing herself as the bad guy in any situation. She didn't mind so much that he saw her as a competitor, a plague, an adversary or a thorn in his side, but she would not be his tormentor.

The next day she brought him a plastic container of spaghetti bolognese she'd made the night before. She barged straight through his door, which was never locked as per his probation conditions, and slammed the container defiantly on his desk. As she whirled out of his office, she thought she caught him looking at her with a puzzled expression twisting his mouth.

Of course, it wasn't _that_ easy. He left the food there. She came back for her container two days later to find it as full as she had left it, the spaghetti starting to moisten and congeal into a sour-smelling mass. This—Hermione leaving food that Malfoy left untouched—went on for two weeks until just recently when, as she returned to grudgingly collect her rotting oblations purely as a matter of principle, she was confronted by the glaring fact that Malfoy was hungry. Deathly hungry, if the high-pitched whine emanating from his stomach was any indication.

"Leave it," he'd nodded sternly at the container of steak and kidney she'd taken home for dinner at the Weasley's. She was a little miffed that the first food he'd get to taste from her wasn't actually made by her, but she was mollified that she'd pushed him and he gave. Just the tiniest bit.

By this time, however, she'd long forgot the point she was trying to prove in the first place. She wondered if it should have bothered her somewhat, the fact that she was no longer being friendly to him only because she felt sorry for him. She decided not to analyse it too much. After all, Malfoy didn't seem to give much of a damn for her motives.

This was another thing that was surprising. That he wasn't as mistrustful of her as she thought he would be. That he didn't automatically jump to conclusions about her based on first impressions. Maybe he _had_ grown up in the war.

They had an understanding: he answered her questions curtly but correctly, she brought him food from home, he pretended that it was beneath his notice, she left him alone. She usually approached Malfoy with her questions: he was coldly professional, disdainfully direct, and more intelligent than anyone she'd ever known. An ugly truth she would never admit, not even to herself.

She noticed that he'd taken to clearing a spot on his desk—the top left corner, where she usually left the food.

Once, when she got caught up talking to Angela Lansing on her way to his office, she saw him stick his head out of his door and cast his glance around the hallway as if he was looking for something. When his eyes met hers, he raised an eyebrow as if nonverbally castigating her for her lateness. She apologised to Angela, who gave her a cheeky, knowing grin, and hurried off to Malfoy's office. On his door, only the large, uppercase M and the c remained.

They did not eat together. They were not friends. Neither of them mentioned it out loud, but she always got her containers back—shiny-clean and stacked neatly like some sort of pagan Tupperware pillar—at the end of the week.

* * *

On Wednesday morning, Hermione walked into Draco's office to inquire about the Dirt Nap Potion, so christened by Luna, whose sense of humor was as childishly obvious as they came.

There was no need for the farce of pleasant banter with him. She expected to walk in and have her answer within five seconds and be able to leave for the cafeteria for lunch with Angela. Perhaps make it in time before they ran out of those strawberry-iced petit fours they only served on Wednesdays.

She came upon his door ajar—which was unusual in itself, as he rigorously employed any and every method of privacy he could get away with—and Malfoy, holding a letter loosely in the fingers of one hand, a smoking cigarette in the other. The air was warmed and dank as if passed through a million sets of lungs before it got to hers. It smelt of smoke and confinement and quiet, quiet despair.

"You can't smoke in here," she said, having thought of nothing else to say to him. She set the insulated lunch container on the corner of his desk. Today's was sesame chicken.

"Malfoy?" she asked, when he made no move to acknowledge her presence.

She was breaking their tradition, she knew, but something in the lines of his mouth told her that this—whatever this smoking and staring and brooding episode was—wasn't a normal occurrence for him. She was frightened.

She remembered hearing of a betting pool going round her team.

When d'you reckon Malfoy's gonna crack? Three weeks? Five months? A year? Think he's gonna kill himself?

Who, _Malfoy_? Nah, he hasn't got the guts.

Couldn't do it to Dumbledore even if it was to save his family. Couldn't do it to himself.

Slytherin, remember? Their lot lives to survive—and nothing more.

And—whether feeling guilty on behalf of her irreverent co-workers, or beneficent due to the recent breakthrough they'd made on the Dirt Nap Potion, or perhaps she was just in a hurry to get to those petit fours—she went ahead and asked the question that was exactly on the forefront on her mind, something that she should have known never to do around Draco Malfoy.

"Are you… Are you alright?"

He looked at her with potent disgust distilled in stone grey. "Fuck _off_, Granger."

Before he spelled the door to slam shut in her face, a glint of gold caught her attention. It was his name written in punctilious script on the back of an envelope sitting on his desk.

And she thought: _oh_.

A yellowed bilge of smoke followed her out into the hallway, curled into itself, and disappeared. Later in the cafeteria, as Angela informed her that the Dirt Nap Potion had passed all three stages of live testing and that they should be getting their own letters today, Hermione caught a whiff of that singed nicotine-and-tar odour clinging to her hair.

* * *

Hermione did all her shopping in a tiny, out-of-the-way grocery store in the middle of nowhere. Its stock was more often than not incomplete, and there was the cloying smell of stale fruit that hung about and was layered over by a piquant tinge of cleaning fluid, but it wasn't too bad. There was almost nothing she enjoyed less than running into acquaintances when she was in a hurry, exchanging awkward small talk and chasing dead-end inquiries of well-being into the ground. She would much rather Apparate into the damp back alley of Grimbucker's sixty kilometers from her flat than answer any unwanted questions.

That afternoon, while trying to decide whether the dates were looking particularly sinister because they've gone bad or because of the forensic glare of the single, fluorescent rod flickering above, she spied a familiar head of hair making its way past the dairy aisle and into the bread area.

The uncanniness of spotting a familiar object in the beige-and-green blandness of Grimbucker's grabbed her attention, and she found herself staring most unbecomingly.

The head was, predictably, attached to a body which, despite the absence of nubby charcoal wool trailing behind it like a cloud of gloom, was made recognizable by its drawn, acuminate movements. Like a man who'd learned to walk within the confines of a tight box. Like a man who went through life trying to take up as little space as possible.

And—yes, there it was—there was the telltale hitch in the right leg, a foreshortening of the step that hinted at some old injury.

What were the odds that she would run into Draco Malfoy in Grimbucker's of all places?

She really should have known that her luck would turn out this way, considering that it was Wednesday.

The very word filled her with a vague sense of sprawling dread and an urge to abandon her purchases and hole herself up in her flat. Wednesday was an ambiguous day: clapped right there in the middle of the week like a lost and unwanted child, Hermione never knew how to feel about it. It was far enough from Monday that she didn't have the excuse of being plunged unceremoniously back into the workweek to complain about (not that she ever complained about work), and far enough from Friday that she couldn't quite look forward to the weekend just yet. To be honest, she would much rather be miserable on a Monday, or lonely on a Friday, just _anything_—as long as she _knew_ what it was she was feeling. She'd have none of this discommodious… _ambivalence_.

With a proper label, anything—_anything_ at all—could be sorted and thus repaired. Never let it be said that Hermione Granger didn't like her labels.

Fucking Wednesdays.

But being who she was meant that she couldn't just leave the prospect of finding out what type of bread Malfoy preferred (she had him pegged for brioche—yeasty and pretentious, just like the man himself) to eat. She dumped the dates into her trolley and wheeled it around to the direction she saw him disappear to.

If she were honest with herself, she would admit that her voyeurism was fueled, in part, by a vengeful streak that was as much a part of her personality as her curiosity. Though she knew he'd received his Dirt Nap Dispatch today, she was still secretly smarting from that brusque _fuck off_.

She parked her trolley by the cheese stand and watched as Malfoy, looking surprisingly taller in Muggle clothing than he did in his robes, examined Grimbucker's bounteous offerings in the sliced loaf department. He looked the same as he did at work—his top lip tense and drawn as if preparing to form itself into that blade-thin sneer at the slightest provocation, his fair brows drawn together in a forbidding v, his arms crossed in front of his chest. His nose, straight and perfectly-formed (as Hermione grudgingly admitted to herself), was wrinkled ever so slightly in faint disgust. This was what kept him relatively safe at work. When face-to-face with Malfoy, most of her co-workers found that he could still put up a good fight.

Behind him, a little old lady glared at the back of his head as she tried to get a crack at the loaves that his body blocked from her view. The lady cleared her throat. Malfoy remained unmoving. Finally, the woman, having had enough, reached around him and clutched at a plastic-wrapped loaf without checking to see what it was.

Hermione was prepared to laugh at Malfoy's reaction, wondering if he was enough of a bastard to unleash his acerbic tongue on an elderly woman. Already the moment was forming itself into an anecdote in her head, one she could share later with her friends. So I ran into Malfoy at Grimbucker's, her story would begin. Understanding or not, she and Malfoy would never be best friends, and she always appreciated the opportunity to have a good laugh once in a while.

Hermione was, however, completely unprepared for what came next.

It wasn't a particularly memorable event, from an objective point of view. In fact, close to nothing at all happened.

Malfoy jumped when the woman's arm brushed his. From Hermione's spot half-crouching behind the refrigerated tubs of cottage cheese, she could see the tendons in his forearm leap beneath his skin, the muscles stirring as if they were agitated and did not quite know what to do with themselves. His right hand closed into a fist, knuckles protruding sharply, and with his other hand he grabbed at the spot where the woman's skin must have touched his. On his left forearm, faded like a watered-down painting but still visible, was the imprint of a past that marked him forever as forsaken by everything he once called his own.

And then, Hermione saw it. His lips barely moved, but she saw it.

"Sorry," he muttered. The woman walked away primly, pretending not to notice.

Draco Malfoy, one of the most obdurate, most bull-headed people Hermione knew, was apologizing to a Muggle. As if he was sorry that he was there. As if he was sorry for letting his tainted skin come within the immediate vicinity of hers.

And Hermione felt that familiar head rush of righteous indignation coursing through her body and straightening her spine, tightening her grip on the handlebar of her trolley. And her breath caught on a lump in her throat because she found herself in the midst of one of those painfully obvious epiphanies that were all collectively called 'growing up.'

Suddenly it was more than just Hermione-and-Draco anymore, more than just The Order and The Death Eaters, more than just the Mudblood and the Pureblood. It had been easy, so _easy_, to think of it in those terms: Hermione being the kind, conscientious girl extending a hand of friendship to her childhood tormentor, the halfway-fallen, possibly-repentant sinner.

But real life does not make itself so amenable to such simple categories. Real life was so much more than labels. Just like she wasn't just a too-big brain concealed beneath a bramble of bushy hair, he was more than a monied sneer hiding a very real anger problem. And wasn't that the most surprising thing of all?

They were just two human beings, she and Draco, Draco and she, two barely-adult people, each with their own share of shame, and doubt, and painful pretense, and furtive transgressions. Each with their own secret insecurities. Each throbbing with their own unfulfilled distant imaginings. Each of them as tremblingly alive as the other. Just a couple of kids whose faces had been shoved deep into those parts they had in themselves that they could not learn to love, but had to live with anyway.

She decided that the sight in front of her—Draco Malfoy purchasing bread, _alone_, to eat,_alone_—was not funny at all, but was, in fact, rather sad.

And maybe, just maybe, what he deserved was not someone to give him handouts of pity, of sympathy, of _compassion_, like spare coins ringing hollow and forlorn in an empty can. Maybe what he deserved was someone willing to wade through the shit he dished out and give him a decent shot.

My, my, would you look at that. Hermione Granger, Stalwart Swot of Gryffindor, finally grew up.

Breathing out a huff of air, as she often did when trying to fortify herself against a seemingly insurmountable task, she braced her elbows against her heavy trolley and pushed, making as much of a clatter as she could to alert him of her presence and give him time to compose himself accordingly.

Hermione pretended not to see him at first. She looked around ostentatiously, critically examining the bread as though her life depended on it. She did not, after all, want him to think that she'd followed him there. After an interim of five seconds, she affected a casual glance, then looked away, then swiftly turned her head back with pleasant surprise etched into every line of her face.

"Malfoy! Fancy seeing you here!" she said loudly, making vague patting motions at her hair. She was gratified when he turned to face her looking unperturbed. The sight of him apologizing had unsettled her deeply, and she wished to vitiate the memory, to disguise it with images of him in top form, sneering and snarling and gritting his teeth, his pale cheeks pinkening, the veins in his temple pulsing with his ire.

"Granger," he stated flatly. The wan lighting stole what little colour his face had. He looked bloodless, younger than he was. Too young. The shadows played at expressions in the lines around his mouth.

She'd never been this close to him before, and she knew that he probably thought that she was in her element, considering they were in a Muggle store, but the truth was she felt as discomfited as he must have himself.

This close, she registered that the top of her head came level with the knob of his collarbone. And that his throat was long, slender, white, and lacquered with a sheen of sweat from the unregulated air conditioning settings of Grimbucker's. And that his shirt, while it did not cling, elucidated the wiry lines of his torso more clearly than his robes ever did. Almost as if for her edification. _This_ is Draco Malfoy's body, it seemed to spell out.

It felt… _indecent_. And so she focused her eyes on the tip of his nose instead.

"You like my cooking, don't you?" she barreled on. She was painfully conscious of the thin ice she was treading: this was the first time either of them had ever openly referred to their information-for-food arrangement. Before he had a chance to correct her, she felt her mouth moving as if it had a life of its own. "Well, I'm having a little get-together at my flat tonight. Nothing fancy. Just people both of us know. It's to celebrate the Dirt Na—I mean... the erm... the Mortality Prognosticating Potion. I'm making a bunch of stuff. It's a full-on five course meal, actually, and I have no idea why I'm doing it, but Ron convinced me that I could pull it off and I think he's right. And anyway it's worth it: we've been at that potion for, what, three years now? But I suppose I don't have to tell you how long we've been working on it since you worked on it right along with me, ha-ha..."

A muscle in his jaw quivered and jumped.

"Well, I'm cooking," she said redundantly, topping it off with a self-conscious little gesture to the contents of her trolley, "And, erm... You should come. I'd like you to come."

He raised an eyebrow at the loaf of bread he was holding in his hands (Pumpernickel, not brioche). Is this what it meant to take a chance, to give someone a shot? To put yourself in a position to be rebuffed?

She bit her lip. "You don't _have_ to, of course. I know we're not really friends, and you don't really like me, bu—"

"Will this... _get-together_ involve proper drink?"

"Oh, yes! Lots and lots of it!" Her grin continued to dangle off her mouth by sheer force of inertia.

The raised eyebrow was turned to her. "Alright."

"Alright?"

And there it was. An echo of his old smirk spanning his lips. What a difference it made in his face. She blinked twice.

"Did I stutter, Granger?"

"Oh, okay! I thought you might have been joki—but nevermind. I'll see you at eight thirty, then!" She wheeled her trolley away, eager to pay for the boatload of food it contained and go back home, where she could hopefully drown herself in the drudgery of cooking for half of Wizarding Britain and forget how bloody stupid she just made herself look to Draco Malfoy.

As she Apparated with a pop into her sitting room, Crookshanks glaring at her for disturbing his nap, she vaguely registered that she'd forgot to give Malfoy her address.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** Hi! If you've read the first three chapters, they're still there. I just condensed them all into one chapter.

To answer some of your questions:

No, this is not a one-shot.

Yes, the Dirt Nap Potion and the Mortality Prognosticating Potion are the same thing. Sorry if that was unclear, I went back in the first chapter and tried to clarify a bit more.

Yes, this was originally meant to be SS/HG. No, the two versions aren't exactly the same. The SS/HG version was a lot angstier, I'd say.

No, unfortunately (or fortunately, I suppose, depending on which you liked better) I don't think I will be continuing the SS/HG version. I'm having a lot of fun writing Draco, but I have no problems with sharing the SS/HG version if anyone would like to read it.

Hope you have fun reading!

* * *

On Wednesday night, forty-five minutes before her guests were supposed to arrive, Hermione Granger poked a potato dumpling with a fork and watched with resigned consternation as it fell apart in the water, swathes of dough unravelling like limp bandages. The naked dumpling floated to the surface of the water and bobbed there. Its motions struck her as being insolently jovial, and so she Vanished the whole thing—dumplings, pot, and all.

"You're going to regret that; you know how much Harry loves those dumplings."

Hermione bit her lip. "Yeah, I know."

"Are you alright?" She heard Ron's footsteps behind her in all their soothingly familiar, slightly shuffling rhythm. The warmth of his large hands pressing into her shoulders was nice. It was always nice. Ron was a nice boy.

"Hermione?"

"Hmm."

"_Hermione._"

"Yes, what is it?"

"Are you alright?" He turned her around to face him. She tipped her head back as he peered into her face.

"Yes, I'm fine, Ron, thank you for asking. The dumplings were never going to make it in time, anyway."

"That's the third pot you Vanished tonight."

"Is it? Well, I suppose I might have lost control there."

Ron smiled warmly at her. With his towering height, he blocked out most of the light from her vision. It spread around his head like a halo, burnishing his hair a darker shade of copper. "Just a little bit," he said, rubbing circles with his thumbs into the skin of her neck.

"Just a little bit," she agreed, smiling back.

He peered around her to inspect the scallops, which were hissing on the cooker. He seemed to come to a decision. "Look, why don't you go and get ready. I'll take care of this."

"Oh," Hermione responded in surprise. "You don't have to do that. Thank you, but I'll be alright. The artichoke hearts still need to be coated in truffle oil, and the snapper and the cherry sauce haven't—"

"Hermione. _Hermione_. This is _your_ night. You were the youngest person on your team, weren't you?"

"I think Malfoy might actually be younger than I am."

Ron chose to ignore her statement. Despite the fact that Malfoy was one of the key figures to the success of the Mortality Prognosticating Potion, Ron was intent on relegating him to the spot of 'resident Death Eater scum.' This imaginary position was also somewhat paradoxical: it was so ridiculously small that Malfoy could never be able to contribute anything _good_ to the team no matter how hard he tried, but also so profoundly large that Malfoy happened to be the root cause of any and all obfuscation and delay in their research progress. Ron's response whenever Hermione told him about problems at work was always to mutter darkly, "Fucking Malfoy." According to Ron, the world's problems were to be blamed on the simple, unfortunate, and irremediable axiom that 'prancy gits' like Malfoy existed.

Hermione had not yet found a way to inform Ron that she'd invited the prancy git to dinner.

"I'm proud of you. We all are. Bloody hell, I still can't wrap my head around it. I mean, think of the _implications_ of your discovery, now that you've worked out how to predict—"

"It's not _predicting_, exactly. Jones and Marthers didn't really put in much work." Jones and Marthers were her research team's Divination 'specialists.'

"—how a person is going to die with… what was it you said? Ninety-nine percent accuracy?"

"It was ninety-eight point ninety-nine," she corrected him patiently. Ron bestowed her with a look of avuncular pride, his smile so shiny that she felt she ought to avert her eyes.

"Well, there you have it," he said, nodding, "Go on, now. I'm sure Mum will forgive you for a less-than-perfect dinner, but she won't let you get away with looking like _that_."

"That bad, huh?"

"Let's just say that you… Um…" He angled his head to look her over. "Yes, it's that bad."

Hermione scowled. "Okay, I'll go get ready. But please, _please_, don't let the snapper burn, alright? Your mum's not _that_ forgiving."

Molly Weasley had very different ideas about how to raise a family and keep a good house, and had never quite forgiven Hermione for having ideas of her own. If she wasn't careful, she was certain to find herself swayed by Molly's mothering powers right into shapeless cardigans and orthopedic footwear, a spatula in her hand and at least three toddlers biting at her ankles at any given time.

Ron gave her a look.

"Yeesh," she grimaced. "You need to work on that eyebrow angle. You're going for condescension, not constipation."

Ron shooed her away from the kitchen with a swat to the bum.

As Hermione was about to close the door to her bedroom, she heard him call out again.

"Yeah?" she called back, one arm trapped against her body as she simultaneously tried to shrug out of her sweaty t-shirt (a big, black one with a mustache, a sombrero, and the words 'Dirty Sanchez' printed on its front—she had no idea where it came from). She hovered at the doorway and waited for a response. Ron said something, but his affable baritone was drowned over by the clanging and sputtering and bubbling sounds of a busy kitchen.

"Come again? I didn't catch that," she called out.

He stuck his head around the corner. "I said, I forgot to tell you, but I got mine yesterday."

Hermione froze. His words were obscure at first. Intangible. Incomprehensible. Like bad handwriting in a different language. But then, as she knew they must, the syllables crystallized into their meaning—into their jarring significance—in her head. She briefly contemplated feigning ignorance, but the time for that had passed. He knew _she_ knew what he was talking about.

"Oh," she said quietly. She hurried to plaster a smile on her face. She could feel it drooping off by the second, but she hoped he would chalk it up to nerves and exhaustion. She used that excuse often enough, didn't she? There was no reason it shouldn't work now.

"D'you… Would you like to read it with me?" Ron's mouth was set in a grim line, his voice sounding suddenly more mature. It didn't suit him. There was excitement trembling underneath it though, morbid as its object was.

"Of course." Her voice was a little too bright. Almost… _prickly_. "I mean, you know, if you_want_ me to. If you don't think it's a bit too personal."

Ron frowned. "No, why would I think that?"

"It's just… It's such a private thing. You know. You don't know what it contains yet, and it might be better if you gave yourself time to—"

"Hermione, I love you. Nothing's too personal for me to share with you."

She waited for that heat to bloom in her cheeks, for that vertiginous, collapsing sensation in the pit of her stomach, for that tingling in her fingers and that lovely, all-encompassing lightness to her head that always used to follow those three words.

Funny… it felt more like an obligatory spasm this time.

She rubbed her big toe into the carpet and bit her lip guiltily. "I _really_ have to get dressed, Ron. We'll look at it later, yeah?"

There was a look on his face that could have been hurt, but he ducked his head too soon for her to see. When he dragged his gaze back up to her face, his eyes were bright but the look was gone. "Listen, whatever… Whatever this is, we'll work it out, right?"

His smile was beseeching. Hopeful. Not as shiny. Sometimes Hermione found herself wishing that she wasn't as quick on her feet, that it took her longer to read the meanings in the in-between spaces of words and the gawky, tender pauses of breath. But, again, she knew exactly what he was on about.

"Don't worry Ron, we'll work it out," she used to tell him when it was just the two of them in the tent back in that awful year, back when Ron had that locket around his neck and needed her to keep its whispered, toxic residue at bay.

And on Wednesday night, thirty-eight minutes before her guests were supposed to arrive, Hermione said it again. Ron seemed grateful. He disappeared back into the kitchen.

She concluded the peeling off of her garments as she kicked her bedroom door shut behind her. There was no time to examine what just happened too closely. She loved Ron. She _truly_ did. It wasn't like they had problems or anything. They were _great_ together.

It was just—with the recent breakthrough at work and the flurry of activity that followed it—she was feeling a bit off. There had to be a better word than 'off' to describe the myriad emotions limping and lagging in her head, each tugging at the strings of her conscious thought for attention, but she was tired and maybe a little grumpy. It was the only word that came to her.

Off.

Bloody Wednesdays.

* * *

On Wednesday night, twenty-two minutes and six seconds before her guests were supposed to arrive, Hermione Granger—who had forgot that she was supposed to be in the shower—sat on her bed and stared at the thick, cream-hued envelope sitting at her nightstand.

And stared.

And stared.

And, finally, picked it up.

Embossed in a very important-looking gold sheen was her name in fussy script, the kind of script she used to admire and try to copy when she was younger. She traced a forefinger over the H, then the E, all the way to the last R of Granger.

They had sent it to her as a sort of courtesy. All members of the research team got one. Before they went public, their superiors said, they deserved to have a free run before everyone else. So it was only the research team and those that volunteered to participate in the clinical trials, like Ron, that got these letters—these Dirt Nap Dispatches.

"Y'know," Angela had sniggered into her coffee, no doubt feeling immensely clever, "because it tells you how you're gonna get bumped off."

Hermione had scoffed indignantly at the name and absolutely refused to call it that at first, but it grew on her. She thought it made the idea of the Dirt Nap Potion easier to swallow, stripped it a bit of some of the fatalism that rang around it like the tolling of a primordial bell. With a silly nickname like Dirt Nap Dispatch, the letter in her hand seemed more like a harmless summons than what it really was: a death sentence.

Hermione tried to imagine the poor sod who was roped into the terrible task of addressing these letters. What did he look like? Did he have sallow skin? Somehow she pictured a tubercular youth with knobby wrists and splotches of purple ringing his eyes. Fingers trembling and twitching his thoughts into words on parchment—a caffeine problem. A penchant for three-syllable words, too, which he indulged with each grandiose descriptive and each touch of his nib to the puddle of gold in his ink bottle. It was an appropriate look, for a harbinger of death. Hermione wondered if he hated his job.

Or, more likely, these Dirt Nap Dispatches weren't addressed individually at all. They were probably addressed by magic, fifty quills penning fifty different letters all at the same time. Hermione quite liked the idea of the twitchy young man who used big words he couldn't pronounce.

Her fingernail slipped underneath the lip of the envelope, and she had a sudden, wild urge to rip it open, to get it over with at last and to finally end the torture.

Images—gruesome to the point of mundanity—flitted through her head. Death by train. Death by fire ant attack. Death by crucifixion. A car crashing into a signpost, the jagged edge of metal bursting through the windshield and catching her by the heart. The air conditioning unit coming loose from the side of a building as she walked past. A molotov cocktail. A Crucio gone too long. A blade slipping sinuously into the space between her ribs. A burning building. Blood, and smoke, and flashes of green, and blood, blood, blood.

And then, more quiet images. Dying of old age, her shapeless, pashmina-clad torso slumped unobtrusively over the side table, her mug tipped to its side and ringed by widening circle of milky brown tea, a sad string of drool caking in the lines around her mouth. Slipping on wet pavement, in the shower, on a slippery square of tile at Gringotts. There were so many places for the creaky bones of an arthritic foot to slip on, after all. She imagined her arms flailing almost comically, her wizened mouth gaping slack, her brain too slow to react.

Or, perhaps, she would die by choking on one of those raisin-oat-bran clusters in her breakfast cereal. Her mum had always warned her about the dangers of living alone with no one around to save you in case of inexplicable accidents such as these. Hermione had, quite predictably, scoffed at her mum and claimed that she could take care of herself, thank you very much.

Hermione didn't know which she preferred: to die with all the works, with blood, gore, anguished faces, and high drama, to _perish_, or simply to slip away inaudibly, making no trouble for anyone.

Both seemed undignified to her. Briefly she wondered if having a preference at all didn't hint at something deeply flawed in her character.

It wasn't a precise science, really. The Dirt Nap Potion only showed you, in exchange for a drop of blood, the date, time, and location of your death, as well as a few short words concerning _how_ you were going to die.

She hefted the weight of the envelope in her palm. It wasn't heavy at all. In fact, if she closed her eyes, she could very well convince herself that she was holding nothing in her palm but the emptiness of air. It seemed so odd to her—sitting cross-legged on her bed in nothing but her bra and knickers—that she held in her hands the one piece of information that could put her life in order. And, furthermore, that these little tidbits of death—_her_death, so portentous, so impossible a concept to properly swallow that it seemed to her a distant probability rather than a concrete possibility—weighed about as much as a packet of crisps.

There was a rush of blood to her head and suddenly she felt unstable, like she was standing alone in the aftermath of a nuclear blast, the air heated and smelling of sulphur, her throat caked with the silt of it.

She huffed because really, this was silly. Once again, she'd managed to overthink herself into a right state.

Stop making excuses, Granger. Just open the damn thing. If Malfoy could do it, than so can you.

On the count of three.

_One_.

Distantly, she wondered if this occasion oughtn't to have a bit more solemnity attached to it. Perhaps she should dress up. Dim the lights. Have a proper countdown, like at New Year's. Perhaps she should light up a cigarette like Malfoy did. Be appropriately grim about the whole business.

_Two_.

From this point onwards, her every action would be marked (_tainted_, supplied the bitch living in her brain) by the knowledge of her death. Picking up groceries, Flooing to work, hanging up her coat, setting up her lab, all of it will be done with a certain indelible passivity. I will die at so-and-so time, at the intersection of so-and-so streets, through so-and-so methods. Will it be visible to the others, she wondered? Will it show on her face? Will her co-workers ask her if she felt ill, or if she did something new with her hair?

_Two-and-a-half_.

And really, isn't that what she wanted? Complete control? Isn't that why she joined the team in the first place? Isn't that why she powered through with the research despite the subtle, nagging feeling of unsettlement deep in her gut during those rare moments of quiet that what they were doing was wrong on an ineffable, metaphysical, _human_ level?

You wanted to show off, didn't you? quipped the more stringent, more honest voice in the back of her head. You wanted to take credit, am I right? You wanted the delicious tingle of discovery thrumming through your veins because that's the only thrill you can get these days, you dull old bag.

No, she told herself. What she wanted was to better the Wizarding World. To give people a solid sense of security and well-being after the first war stole it from them, and the second war yanked it from between their fingers before they've learned to call it their own. To give them the peace of mind of being able to prepare themselves. To give them the choice of a dignified death.

This was a _good_ thing.

_Three_.

She twisted off a corner of the envelope just as Ron dropped something in the kitchen, the sound of it juddering through her walls and cutting right to her pounding heart. The seconds seemingly dripped through the continuum of space and time at an ungodly rate as she sat there, one hand clutched to her chest, the other dangling the envelope in front of her. She let it drop to the bed. She almost kicked it away. She'd no idea why her palms were sweating, why her mouth felt dry and her tongue too big, why she was breathing as if she'd just stepped of the lip of a gaping, endless chasm, one whose blackness bled outward like a disease.

She leapt from the bed and dashed to the bathroom, trying to untangle her hopeless hair and mop up her sweaty face. She looked terrible. She smelled even worse. She cast a quick Cleaning Charm in the general direction of her body, wincing as the tepid swirl of magic hit her skin. It was only after she had put something on when she realised that her new, black dress was a size too small.

* * *

On Wednesday night, seven minutes and thirty-eight seconds after her guests were supposed to arrive, there were no guests. Hermione, sitting on her sofa and counting down each tick and each tock of the clock on the wall, was seized by a sudden impulse to take down all the photos containing her family. She dashed around her sitting room doing just that.

* * *

On Wednesday night, eight minutes and fifteen seconds after her guests were supposed to arrive, Hermione put all the pictures back.

Surely Malfoy wouldn't have the audacity to make snide comments about her Muggle family while he was having dinner in her home.

And what did she care if he did? She could handle him.

* * *

On Wednesday night, eight minutes and fifty-three seconds after her guests were supposed to arrive, Hermione cast an Extension Charm on her dining room—which was less a room and more a glorified nook. And then she thought: Would Malfoy notice? Would he think it pretentious? Would he say that she was trying too hard? He might not say it, but he would definitely think it. He'd think it so hard that she would see it in his every move.

And so she undid the Extension Charm.

But she took the pictures down again.

* * *

On Wednesday night, seventeen minutes and fifteen seconds after her guests were supposed to arrive, the doorbell rang, and Hermione stiffened in her seat.

In her head, she was cool and collected as she answered the door politely. In her head, there he stood, framed by the doorway, the peach petunia wallpapered hallway stretching out behind him.

The doorbell rang again. The picture in her mind rippled and dispersed, to be immediately replaced by a tight spasm of anxiety.

"Alright, I'm coming!"

It wasn't Draco Malfoy at all. It was Harry-and-Ginny, as they were commonly referred to these days.

"Come in, come in!" Hermione felt her mouth crinkle drily at the corners as she beamed at her friends, trying not to let the pinch of disappointment show on her face. This was immediately washed over by a wave of guilt. She seemed to be feeling that a lot today. Guilt, that is.

What did she expect Malfoy to do, locate her file and track down her address just so he could have a chance to have dinner with a group of people he hated?

"Alright, Hermione?" Ginny smiled, brushing her cheek against Hermione's and moving past her into the kitchen to chat with Ron.

"Sorry we're late..." Harry said, his face suspiciously red. "See, Ginny had this, er, last minute _thing_ she had to do... And she neede—"

"Please, Harry. Just... stop. I don't want to hear about any last-minute _anythings_ you and Ginny get up to, alright?"

Harry gave her a sheepish grin and a very big, very warm, very Harry-ish hug. They hadn't seen each other for a while and it was nice to catch up. They sat on her sofa and talked about the Mortality Prognosticating Potion, which Harry always held a keen interest for.

"I'd like it to be quiet, personally," Harry said, scratching his chin. "In the country somewhere. I want no one to find out until a good six hours after it happens."

"What? You'll rot and stink up the place."

"Not if I die in the winter. The cold will keep my corpse nice and fresh."

"I suppose that's not too strange. I could help you out, you know. I could off you in the rec room at a retirement home somewhere in Somerset. You _know_ I'd be quiet about it, too."

Harry crinkled his nose at her. "That's lovely, that. Thank you."

"You know. What are friends for and all that wonderful stuff," she said, craning her neck.

"What's wrong?" he asked her as she, for the seventh time since they arrived, glanced out the window. "You expecting someone to pop up out there or something? And what happened to all the picture frames you had up?"

"I, uh, yeah. Oh, the pictures? Well, I invited Draco. You know. Malfoy." As if there were any other Dracos they both knew. Not _that_ Draco. The Pureblood. You know. The sneering blonde? Hair to right about here? Sneer about this wide?

"You invited _Malf_—"

"_Shush_, alright?" She made a circumspect tour of her flat with her eyes, trying to gage if anyone was eavesdropping. "I forgot to give him my address, and I'm just worried he might Apparate into the middle of the street and get run over or something. You don't need to tell Ron; I'm fairly certain he might not even show up."

"Do you... _want_ him to show up?" Harry's question was cautious.

"Yes. No. I mean... What is _that_ supposed to mean?"

"I mean _why_ exactly did you invite him? You can't really fault me for asking that question."

She crossed her arms defensively. "Because he's my friend—don't look at me like _that_. Why are you looking at me like that?"

"You know your poker face is complete bollocks, right?"

"Oh, aren't you clever," she sniffed. "Honestly. You defeat _one_ Dark Lord and suddenly you think you're so magnificently perceptive. What, killed Voldemort with a pithy little one-liner, did you?"

"Ha-ha-ha-ha," Harry recited in perfect monotone. "You get funnier with age, Hermione. Has anyone ever told you that? But _seriously_, you think I can't see what you're doing? Stop stalling and answer my question."

Hermione fidgeted and pressed her fingers into her temples, rubbing circles into the stress headache she could feel coming on.

"Because... Because he's—he's not—he's an _okay_ sort of bloke, Harry. He's not the nicest guy in the world, but... And _Jesus_, you should see the way people treat him at work. It isn't so bad now, not that they've seen that we talk sometimes, but I can't... I just couldn't—"

"Because you can't stand seeing any other person—not even someone who's made your life hell and probably would still be doing so if he hadn't lost everything he had—being treated like shit."

"Well. yes. Basically. Is that such a bad thing?" she said quietly.

Harry smiled at her with an air of fond resignation. "Of course not. You can't help it, can you?"

"No, not really." She wished she could. It wasn't exactly fun for her, having to confront the truth that she _didn't_ want people to be mean to Draco Malfoy. "And... I don't know if I should be telling you this, but I saw him with his DND today."

"DND?"

"The Dirt Nap—Oh, yes that's right, I forgot we don't have the same friends anymore. We call it the Dirt Nap Dispatches over at the lab. It was Angela's idea. The name stuck, somehow. Anyway, I saw him with it. It was open on his desk and I think he probably read it. I mean, he deserves a break after just finding how he's going to die."

"Dirt Nap Dispatch?" Harry pushed his glasses up his nose with a forefinger and frowned. "Isn't that a little... distasteful? Wouldn't—I dunno—Epistle of Death be more appropriate?"

"Yes, but is it _catchy_?"

"Ah, the question of the year. No, it doesn't quite roll off the tongue, does it? It was a stupid name anyway—too Catholic. But, hang on, did you _really_ think inviting Malfoy to a houseful of Gryffindors would be a 'break'?"

"Okay, well... fair point."

Harry rolled his eyes. "It was an _excellent_ point."

"Alright, an excellent point. Stop rolling your eyes at me or I'll poke them. I suppose I just didn't think of it that way. I wanted... I wanted to be nice to him. There aren't very many people that are nice to him, and I think it's rather sad."

"I get that, Hermione. I _really_ do. I don't think he deserves all that crap either. But... so you're telling me you want him to, I dunno, come _waltzing_ in here without even at least_warning_ Ron beforehand? Do you not know Ron or something? You know, the big bloke in the kitchen with the fists and the red hair and the temper?"

"Malfoy's not going to _waltz_ anywhere, Harry. He's going to come in my home and respectfully eat dinner. He just needs... a decent shot. Please, _please_ just try to be nice."

"But not _too_ nice. You know he'll only think we're trying to kill him."

"Yes."

"Fine," Harry said simply. He smiled at her again. With anyone else it would have seemed paternalistic and condescending and she might have told them to shove it, but Harry could pull it off. He was wearing the Led Zeppelin t-shirt she got him two years ago for his birthday. She smiled back at him.

"Thanks, Harry."

"Hermione... I..." Harry bulged his tongue into his cheek, the way he does when he's uncertain. When he spoke again, his tone was cautious. "I hope this isn't another one of your helping-people things. The House Elves were one matter, and I'm not saying you did a bad job with them, but people don't really appreciate being handled like charity cases. Malfoy doesn't deserve to be treated like scum, but he doesn't deserve to be treated like a... like a _project_, Hermione."

She bit her lip and looked into her lap. Harry dipped his head to look into her face. "Hermione, that's not what this is, is it?"

She opened her mouth to reply but, finding no words coming to her aid, closed it again. But before she had to properly acquit herself, the doorbell rang.

"I'm sorry, I have to get the door," she shrugged. Harry sighed.

In five minutes, all but one of Hermione's guests arrived. Molly smiled at Hermione, took her hands, and said: "I'm so happy for you, dear. For _both_ of you."

Hermione, who'd been preparing herself for something deceptively complementary to come out of Molly's mouth, felt the frosty smile melt from her face. "Thank you, Molly. _Sincerely_. It took us three years of research and a whole year of pushing it through the red ta—"

"Oh, I'm not talking about that _dreadful_ potion, dear."

"Sorry?"

Molly patted her hand and winked. "You'll see, Hermione. You'll see soon enough."

* * *

Malfoy did not show up. Not at eight thirty-five. Not at eight forty-seven. Not at nine fifteen. Not even at ten-oh-three, when Hermione was starting to think that she may have had a bit too much wine to drink.

She poured herself another glass-full and tried to pay attention to what Dean Thomas was telling her about how _he_ reckoned he was going to bite the dust. He hadn't fully read his DND yet. It was sitting on his mantle at home, weighed down by a half-eaten apple core. All he'd read was the location of his death. And then he panicked and Apparated to the alley outside Hermione's building and ended up almost splinching himself.

"It's going to be at fifty-three, I tell you," Dean announced firmly.

"Yeah, no, fifty-three is an excrell... ex-shlument... excell... It's a very fine age to die."

"Fifty-three. In Mexico, sometime in the summer. It'll have something to do with the peanut allergy, I'm sure of it. Not too glorified a way to go, but it'll be in Mexico, so there's that."

* * *

On Wednesday night, seventy-four minutes and eight seconds into dinner, Ronald Weasley sank to one knee right there in front of their friends and family and asked Hermione to make him the happiest man on Earth.

In her head, the moment conducted itself in advance. She felt, before it touched hers, the moistened heat of his hand, the weight of his eager gaze, the cold constriction of the ring slipping around her finger.

In her _head_, she was ecstatic, and the moment was perfect, and her mouth tremulously formed the words _yes, yes, yes_.

But in her heart, all was quiet.

On Wednesday night, seventy-six minutes on the dot into dinner, Hermione Granger said no.

Before she left, Molly gave her a wringing look that made her feel like the scum of the earth.

* * *

The temptation was to purchase cans of food, filtered water, perhaps some candles. She'd ward her flat shut from all intruders and stay in for a month or two, grow out her nails and her hair, let herself waste away. But that wouldn't do. Certainly not here in her flat, where the scent of grease clung to the roof of her mouth every time she took a breath.

In the night sky outside her window, in its quiet constellated depths stretching big and blinding across the whole of her street, Hermione thought of how nice it would be to go out and get some fresh air in that pinpricked darkness.

And so she slipped her Dirty Sanchez t-shirt on over her too-tight dress, grabbed the dish of leftover pudding, Summoned a spoon, and headed out into the hallway outside her flat. Because everyone needed pudding in times of profound disquiet.

She didn't actually know where she was going and she must have been more drunk than she thought. The nagging voice in her head—more timid but, unfortunately, still there—told her that this was unsafe. And possibly stupid. That she didn't get to feel this conflicted, not in a situation that came about of her own doing. But the thought of returning to her flat, with its remnants of a celebration gone stale, turned her stomach.

The hallway was cramped and dingy, nothing but a large potted plant in the corner to lend it a spot of moribund cheer, but the night air managed to worm its way into the scant space. Hermione loved the smell of the night. She made it as far as the stairwell when she decided that it was far enough, and she sat down.

And as she fisted her dress around her knees, Hermione found—crumpled in her pocket and pressing into her skin with a heat that insinuated itself into the crevices of her brain—her Dirt Nap Dispatch.

She felt like laughing, or crying, just _anything_ to dispel the the fist-sized lump threatening to block off her air supply. Anything to bring the gravity back. Anything at all.

Let's try this again, Granger. On three.

_One._

_Two._

_Thre—_

"Are you sure that's really what you want, Granger?"

Sitting on the top step—his knees splayed wide apart, smoking like it was his last day on Earth—was Draco Malfoy. He looked different from how he did in Grimbucker's. Cockier. More of an arse. Less passive. More like how he used to be before the war. His probation contract was in a drawer somewhere far off, its tendrils of authority having no power in her stairwell. He probably thought he was making some sort of impression, and it annoyed her.

What was infinitely more annoying was that, somehow, finding Draco Malfoy sitting in her stairwell was the only thing that made sense out of her entire night.

And so she said: "Oh. It's you."

He scowled and blew out a stream of smoke through his nostrils.

"Nice shirt."

"Shut up about the shirt," she groused, wrapping her arms around her torso. She eyed his coat enviously as she leaned against the wall. "You're... here. I didn't think you'd be here. But you're _here_."

"It certainly seems that way, doesn't it?"

"What are you doing here, Malfoy?"

"You invited me for dinner."

She pressed her palms against her face, fingertips digging into her forehead. Her voice was muffled as she spoke. "Yes... but I forgot to give you my address. And anyway what I meant was what are you doing _here_. In the _stairwell_."

"I looked up your file. Couldn't Apparate through your wards. And since I was here anyway, I thought I might as well get to see you naked."

She brought her hands down. "You... You what?"

"I wanted a shag, Granger."

"Oh?" Her voice was several octaves higher than usual. His delivery had been completely monotonous, nothing in it to tell her he was joking. She raised her eyebrows and tried to look for composure in the spot between his eyes. "And—and just how did you plan on doing that? Tying me up and stripping me down?"

She felt her entire face and upper chest warm as soon as the words left her mouth. Her verbal filter seemed to be slower than usual. Must be the wine.

There was a pause as he took a drag from his cigarette, and she couldn't help but watch the movements of his mouth. The teeth. The jaw. He sucked at his cigarette with sensuous languor, then pulled it away from his lips with a swift, agitated motion. She felt her stomach drop when, without warning, his eyes snapped straight on to hers.

"Not worth the effort," he said.

"How... rude."

Even in the cheerless glow of the bare bulb above them, Malfoy looked expensive. So expensive, in fact, that he made the stairwell seem twice as shabby than it could have been. She frowned and wondered if he was doing it on purpose. Maybe his powers of condescension were so strong that they could actually physically alter his surroundings.

He made a dry, scratchy sound that could have been a laugh.

"Relax, Granger. I wanted a smoke. Then I wanted another. What better place to light up than in Hermione Granger's non-smoking stairwell? There's a bit of poetic justice to that, isn't there?"

"If you say so." She rolled her eyes and sat back down on the stairs, a step above the one she previously occupied. A step closer to him. "Should I smoke in your stairwell too? Perhaps I should ring your doorbell and run away. That'd show you."

"Stairwells are for Weasleys and reprobates."

"What does that make me?"

He raised an eyebrow and gave her a look that made her want to pull the hem of her t-shirt down to her knees. "I'd say you're a little bit of both. Hasn't the Weasel sealed the deal yet?"

"You knew he was going to propose?"

"You didn't?"

"I suppose it was within the realm of possibility..."

"_Within the realm of possibility_?" He made a low whistling sound. "Granger, the _Daily Prophet_ ran a poll on who your children would take after. Red hair or brown? Buck-toothed or freckled? Obnoxio—"

"I think we broke up, actually. So there won't be any children, redheaded or otherwise," she said stiffly, sticking her nose in the air. The pronunciation left her mouth before she could remind herself that this was Malfoy, and that she didn't owe him any explanations. Suddenly she felt as though she were standing in a wind tunnel, the floor tilting underneath her, her lungs too small. Verbalizing the fact that she and Ron were over—four years, _over_—made it more unbearably true than she ever thought it could be.

Surprisingly, Malfoy kept silent.

She picked up the dish of pudding and started to eat. It was sodden, unpleasantly gelatinous, and very brown. She refused to be bothered by the smacking sounds it made in her mouth as she chewed.

"Do you want some?" she offered tentatively, remembering her manners.

He took one look at it and curled his lip. "What the fuck is that?"

"No need to be an arsehole about it. It's over-cooked pudding. I _did_ offer you dinner."

"Bring it here."

She stood and climbed the three steps that separated them, trying not to let her self-consciousness show too much in her movements. He already had enough ammunition as it was. When she sat down next to him, her bare knee brushed his wool-clad one, and she was surprised to see that he didn't move away. Didn't even twitch.

Although, she never really thought he'd be one for sitting on stairs either. Or for agreeing to have dinner with her. Or for being slightly funny. Or for talking to her at all. But tonight was already going strangely enough, and she decided not to question it too much.

He poked a finger at the pudding and it wobbled sinisterly under his touch. She looked away when he stuck his finger in his mouth.

"So... how is it?"

"Apparently not laced with poison."

"Oh, hang on, I'll get you a spoon."

He scoffed at her. "What, is your saliva muddy, too?"

And proceeded to stick her used spoon in his mouth. "Too soon?"

"No... I... Are you sure you ought to be making jokes? It's just... You got your DND today as well, didn't you? And you read it."

The last part sounded like a statement of fact instead of a question. He ignored it.

"The conditions of my probation stipulate that I can get up to eight moderately amusing jokes per day or, alternatively, ten mild jibes at either Potter or Weasley."

"Was _that_ a joke?"

He brought the cigarette to his lips. Offered her the spoon. "I don't know. How funny would you say it was?"

"It was no gut-buster. But it merited perhaps a half-hearted chuckle." She had a bite of pudding and tried not to concentrate too hard on the fact that the spoon carried with it the heat from inside his mouth. She handed it back to him.

He scraped the charred, sugary bits off the side of the dish with the spoon and ate that too. "Well, half-hearted chucklers can go up to fifteen per day, so brace yourself." Took another drag.

"You can't smoke here," she said, because how else was she supposed to respond to this dry, deadpan, _joking_ Draco Malfoy, who was currently eating pudding out of her lap?

"You seem to say that a lot when you've got nothing else to say."

"Well... You can't. I'm serious. There are smoke alarms."

"Fuck off," he said. There wasn't any heat to it, though.

There was another bout of silence. The moment should have felt awkward. The seconds should have swelled around them. It didn't. They didn't. She stared at the scant bit of skin left exposed in the gap between his shoes and his trousers. It was as pale as she thought it would be. Paler.

And there was the scent of night, and the paler-than-white of his exposed ankles, and the blood rushing in her ears like the throbbing of a distant drum.

"I wondered how long you'd last," he said at last, just when she got used to the sound of their breathing in rhythm. His voice was low.

"What?"

"With your letter. What is it your funny little friend calls it? The blonde with the tits?"

Hermione tutted disapprovingly. "The blonde with the tits is called Angela, and the letter is called a Dirt Nap Dispatch."

"Is she a Gryffindor? I can tell because of her wondrously creative naming skills."

"Should I open it?"

"Why the fuck are you asking me? Do you _want_ to open it?"

"I... I don't know." Her eyelids felt heavy and tight, and her breath hitched in her throat. She looked up at him. "What did yours say?"

"It said we're all going to die, Granger. You, me, Weasley, your big-titted friend. We're all just ticking away. No. Exceptions. It doesn't fucking matter _how_."

"Yes it does," she retorted, offended that he could so easily dismiss what she couldn't even bring herself to wrap her head around. "How could it _not_ matter? There is a _world_ of difference between being accepting of one's state of mortality and waking up in the morning knowing _exactly_ how you're going to leave this Earth! How could anyone _live_ at all knowing that—at a set time, at a set place—you're... I dunno... _destined_ to—like you're just_killing time_—"

"Then why do you even have it with you still?" he was glaring at her, and she wondered if he had the right to be this angry. "Why are you torturing yourself? Why don't you just burn the fucking thing?" He made to grab it from her but she held it above her head. The pudding dish clunked to the floor, unnoticed.

"Because... Because Ron _did_ ask me to marry him!"

He stopped trying to grab her DND and stared at her, his eyes squinted in incredulity. Then he huffed out a laugh. "_That's_ why you want to know how you're going to die? Because you're so miserable about Weasl—"

"No, shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" She got to her feet again and swiped at her burning eyes with the back of her hand. "I said no, alright? I mean to say: yes, Ron. I love you, Ron. Of course, Ron. I meant to kiss him and maybe cry a little bit. But you know what I said?"

She cackled. Her voice was rising in pitch and she knew she probably looked a little deranged.

"You know what I said? I said: I can't. I'm sorry. _It's not you, it's me_. Those words _actually_left my mouth. In front of his _whole family_."

She looked at him like she was daring him to laugh, but he just looked at her. All the bluster left her in one fell swoop. She slumped back on the floor. "_Jesus_. I know what Harry must have been thinking. He looked at me like... I told him I invited you, and he probably thinks we have some torrid... _thing_ going on."

"You and I?" Malfoy said scornfully.

"Don't look so excited, now," she responded dutifully. She was... tired. Just plain tired.

"I can see why Weasel wanted to marry you. Your insane need for control would cancel out his slack-jawed, knuckle-dragging stupidity. Between the two of you, you might actually make up one halfway normal person."

The moment stretched between them.

"_What_?" Hermione said. She looked at him—at the expression on his face that never once ventured too far past sullen and sardonic—and laughed. She laughed until she thought she might cry, and then she _did_ cry, a stitch digging into her stomach, her breath wheezing and desperate. Malfoy gave her a look of thorough disgust.

Because it was funny. Because it was absurd. Because no one else she knew—no, not even Harry—would have dared to joke about her ex-boyfriend barely an hour after they broke up. She sat down next to him again, placing her arms on her knees and her chin on top of them. She could feel his gaze on her like a hand around the back of her neck.

"He read his DND too, you know. Ron. He's going to die at the ripe old age of a hundred and four surrounded by his children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. No regrets. _That's_ why he proposed. He took it as a sign meaning we were meant to be with each other—no, don't laugh. He's not as stupid as you think he is. You know... I might have thought it romantic when I was younger."

"It _is_ romantic." He pushed his tongue into the space between his bottom lip and his teeth. He did this a lot, she thought, and she wondered if he noticed. "That's the sort of sugar-coated, saccharine bullshit that fuels romance: destinies and meant-to-bes and happily ever after."

"That didn't sound bitter at all," she laughed quietly. He didn't answer, preferring to purse his lips and push out a billow of smoke with his tongue.

"We've been together for four years, okay? Four. Years. That's like... That's a little over half of a standard magical education. That's a Potions Apprenticeship. The entire _war_ happened in less than four years, okay? So four years is a big dea—"

"If you wanted to marry him, why didn't you? Nothing's stopping you. So Floo the Weasel. Go right now. Run if you must," he drawled.

"I don't know why I... Why I said no."

"Are you confused, then? Are you drowning in the big, big world and all its big, big problems? Are you _shitting_ yourself at the thought that you can't control life and its vicissitudes? Well, your membership certificate is on its way, because you're _in the fucking club_. It's called the human race."

"You're an arsehole."

"You're a control freak."

"Prat."

"Bitch."

"Blondie."

"Weasel-lover. Oh, _excuse me_... I meant _ex_-Weasel-lover."

"Illiterate... lying... rotten... brioche-eating... stairwell-smoking... dickless... stiff-legged... dipshit!"

He looked impressed. "That was a good try. But for the record, I prefer Pumpernickel."

"I know."

"Ah. How could I have forgot? Do you also know my exact morning routine, then? How I take my coffee? Where I run in the afternoons? What drawer I keep my underwear in?"

"I wasn't bloody stalking you; I happen to shop at Grimbucker's," she gritted out. Then she flung her arms out in exasperation. "I thought I knew what I wanted, alright? _This_ is what I wanted. I worked for this my whole life. I wanted that job, and I wanted _Ron_—how could I not? He's good, and kind, and honest, and he _loves_ me. I _wanted_ this, Malfoy. I gave up so much and I—I put. Time. In." She punctuated each word by slapping her fist against her open palm.

"So why do I feel like I somehow... _ended up_ here? Why do I feel so..."

Her voice trailed off pathetically. Unhappy? Vaguely dissatisfied? Afraid? She did not know how to finish that sentence without making herself sound like a whining brat. And she was still marvelling at the fact that Malfoy was still _here_, listening to her tell him about her life's problems and her biggest insecurities. It was probably the wine. It _had_ to be the wine.

"With Ron, things weren't... _explosive_ or... or _beatific_, but it was _mine_. _He_ was mine. What if I just got lucky with him? What if that was the happiest I will ever be?"

"The world doesn't owe you happiness, Granger," Malfoy said quietly. "Stop living your life expecting rainbows and sunshine out of every fucking corner."

"Yeah. Right. Like _you_ would know anything about unhappiness. Like _you_ would—"

She stopped herself abruptly at the look on his face. Because he _did_ know. Better than she could ever say for herself.

"I'm sorry. I'm _sorry_, Draco. I just... You're right. The world doesn't owe us anything. I just wish I knew... I just wish I knew what I was doing, you know? I just wish that I knew what I wanted."

"And you think knowing how you're going to die will fix that."

"It's worth a shot."

"Whatever, Granger." He stood up. "As adorable as your little identity crisis is, I'm sure I've got better things to do."

"Okay..." she answered, suddenly not feeling up to coming up with a clever retort. She felt lightheaded and lost, even if she wasn't more than a few feet from her home. She watched the movements of his shoulders as he walked down the steps away from her.

At the base of the stairs, he paused. She was about to chastise him as he dropped his cigarette to the floor and stomped it out right there, but her words caught in her throat when he turned to her. She thought he might have forgot something and looked around her to see what it was, but there was nothing there but his cold, cold ashes, fluttering around in an unseen wind.

"Granger." In the dim light, his eyes were colorless and clear. They were sharper than she remembered ever seeing them. Strange.

He cleared his throat. She got the feeling that he might be trying to say something important. "Look. Stop acting like... Like there's a fucking Board of Testers waiting for you at the end of it all. Like they're waiting for you to trip up so they can draw a big, fat 'T' on your forehead. You know who else doesn't know what they want out of life? Every. Single. Person. No one gives a shit about your bloody existential drama. There's nothing grand in it. You're bored, so change something. Just do what you want to do."

"Just do what I want to do?" she sniffed. "You mean like... be spontaneous?"

"_Shit,_ Granger. There you go with your need for definitions," he said frustratedly. "But fine._Sure_. If you want to call it that, then _be spontaneous_. Turn it into a fucking self-help mantra. Get it tattooed on your bloody arse in Latin, I don't care, just don't ask me your redundant questions."

She stood up. "Do you really mean that?"

"Yes, Granger. Your voice is irritating enough. I don't need to hear you repeating everything I say in question form."

"I meant when you said just do what I want to do."

He looked at her oddly as she went down the stairs toward him. She stopped in front of him and she was forced to acknowledge, once again, just how tall he was. So she backed up a step. And placed her hands on his chest. And pulled him closer by the lapels of his coat. They were on fairly equal footing, now.

"Don't tell me you're going to kiss me just to prove a point," he said, his voice quizzical and faintly amused.

She meant to say: "Of course not. Why would I want to kiss you?"

But she didn't actually get to finish her sentence because she leaned in too fast, and breathed in too eagerly, and her hands seemed to be working against her rapidly-firing brain because they were on Draco Malfoy's shoulders, and then she was pulling him down and pressing her lips up against his.

Were his lips soft? Or chapped? Or pliant? Did he freeze? Was he pushing her away?

She could barely tell because her her heart was beating with pinpoint precision, the blood gushing with a surreal intimacy inside of her—atrium-to-ventricle-to-atrium-to-ventricle—and because her brain was at the moment beset by a cacophony of discordant thought, each slamming to the forefront of her brain with staggering immediacy.

Did she think it might make her feel better? Because it didn't. She was frightened and nervous before this, and she felt even more uncertain now, and she didn't know if it was a good-uncertain, or a bad-uncertain, or an Oh-my-God-this-is-fucking-terrible uncertain.

Above all, ringing strident and harsh like a clarion call, was the thought: What are you doing? What _the hell_ are you doing?

All she wanted was a bit of solidity, a bit of _gravity_. Did she think she'd find it with Malfoy? Because _he_ wasn't solid. She knew that so, so well. Malfoy was doubt, and dissembling, and second-guessing, and never-quite-knowing, and nerves, and pale, pale eyes that cut straight to the bone, and skin that was as fine up close as it seemed from a mile away, and—

And then someone flipped a switch—a giant fucking switch that turned off all rational thought, and all the lines and categories and labels, and all the _gravity_—because he was kissing her back.

And she thought: Maybe I'm overthinking it.

So she stopped thinking.

His lips _were_ soft, and chapped, and pliant, but those were all just silly words that didn't mean anything anymore, not to her, not now. They were all of those things. They were so much more. They were also unbearably warm and wet as they slid against hers, his breath escaping at the gaps between seeking flesh and mingling with hers, her eyes closed and his teeth nipping as they kissed, and kissed, and kissed.

Her field of awareness was narrowed to the now-hesitant, now-aggressive movements of his lips, to the warmth emanating from his body, to the breathy little noises he made against her mouth, to the inches—mere _inches_—separating her breast from the firmness of his chest, to the four points of ice-cold heat on the side of her neck: the very tips of his fingers pressed to her skin as he anchored her to him with the barest of touches. She was dizzy with the thought of the oxygen flowing from her to him, from him to her.

And then he pulled back to growl against her open mouth: "What _the fuck_ are you doing?"

And she slammed her palms against his chest, pushed him away, pulled him back. Her reply was just as vicious. "I _don't_ fucking _know_."

He made an angry sound and wrapped his hand around the back of her neck and kissed her again. Hard. Harder. And she gave back just as good as she got until she thought her head would implode from the pressure.

He tasted like mint and bread pudding and the faint biting undertone of smoke that she didn't mind at all, not one bit. He tasted like the night air.

She felt his arms wind around her and the muscles of them bunch and pull as he drew her body to his. She thought she must have been raging drunk. Or delirious. Both of them had to be. And _Jesus_, it was glorious. She wanted to wring every single drop of happiness out of whatever... _this_ was.

Their moans tangled together in the air—lustful and muffled—as his tongue touched hers.

They broke apart abruptly. There was no slowing down, no stages of softening touch or easing pressure. They were kissing—and then they weren't. He probably knew that reality would find them both, that they would soon remember that she was Hermione Granger, and that he was Draco Malfoy, and that these two names should never be together, and that their owners should certainly not be kissing in a barely-lit stairwell. He took his warmth with him when he stepped back.

He looked at her strangely, almost shyly, and she realised that she'd always known him as quietly simmering in anger or—like he was tonight—sarcastic and dry and always, _always_on the offensive. She didn't know how to deal with _this_ version of him though, this sober, starker, slightly awkward Draco Malfoy. This half-way repentant, maybe-funny boy who certainly _looked_ like he could be a sinner. And a damn good one, at that.

But then, what kind of sinner could have scarfed down a pound of soggy, limp bread pudding in under ten minutes?

No, she decided. She could _never_ get used to this. _Never_ get used to _him_.

"That was _cute_, Granger," he said, his voice low and rough and maybe just a little shaky.

"It's... uh... what?" she replied. She tried not to stare at his face, with his cheeks visibly pink even in the dark and his lips flushed red and swollen. She brought her fingers to her own, wondering if they looked the same. Her fingertips felt tingly.

"But tell me," he ground out through his teeth. Through the fug scuffing through her brain, she could not understand why he looked so angry. "Was that you doing what you wanted to do? Or was that just you trying to prove another fucking point? Did it make you feel _good_, kissing a charity case? Another deposit to your fucking morality bank, am I?"

"What _the hell_ are you talki—"

His face was all of a sudden in hers and, when he spoke, his breath curved hotly around the plane of her cheek. "I don't mind being your rebound shag, Granger, but take your_pity_ and your _commiseration_ and your tenderhearted _handouts_ somewhere el—"

"That wasn't... It wasn't a rebound," she blurted out. Her voice seemed too loud for the situation.

He tightened his lips and drew back in one swift motion, turning from her and pinching the bridge of his nose. "It might have been," he said, so quietly that she shouldn't have heard him over the thudding in her head. But she did.

"It might have been," Hermione agreed.

She rubbed her elbow and scuffed her toe on the edge of the step to fill the silence. Then she felt suddenly silly that she was still standing on the step—looking like a _child_ in her ugly t-shirt, most likely—so she stepped down.

He brought his eyes to hers at the movement and looked her from head to toe. She stared back, unable to decide if she wanted the moment to end or not. Then he made a sound, like a huff of air or another one of his bitter, raspy, not-really-a-laugh laughs, and kept on walking down the stairs. She sat down, confused and perhaps a little bit hurt, and listened to his footsteps as he headed to the exit, their reverberations hitting her from all directions.

And then she heard it, his voice calling out from all the way down in the ground floor, distant and unclear but still unmistakably his: "That was the worst bloody dinner I've ever been invited to, Granger. Even crazy old Aunt Bella could have done better. You owe me another one."

On Wednesday night, two-hundred and fifty-three minutes and nineteen seconds after her guests were supposed to arrive, Hermione Granger tried not to smile. She really did. But she was unable to help herself, and she had to bite her lip to keep it from taking over her entire face.

"Why the bloody hell not?" she called back.

It was funny that—as their team made the discovery that would put the good people of Wizarding Britain in control of their lives—she found herself steadily losing control of her own.

What was even funnier was that she might have been okay with it.


End file.
